Network With Us

Community Story

Racheal Tighe

Mindarie, Perth, AL
Teacher

"ReadWriteThink provides me with a wealth of inspiration and ideas to use in my classrooms. The thing I like most about the site is knowing that the knowledge shared, is provided by fellow professionals, also passionate about children’s education and the use of exemplary teaching strategies. "

Racheal Tighe's StoryCreative ideas for engaging students in real learning

In order to be able to do this I am constantly on the hunt for great teaching ideas and ReadWriteThink is one of my favorite places to search for inspiration. Last week I was planning to have my students write a haiku poem as a grammar lesson. After browsing through ReadWriteThink I found a good range of lessons on haiku poetry that were relevant to my task. I used pieces from two different lessons on ReadWriteThink to create my own lesson. Firstly, I discussed the features of haiku poetry and then showed some examples in a very simple powerPoint presentation that I put together. We discussed the use of syllable and descriptive language in the poems, before going out on a nature walk to collect autumn leaves and brainstorm autumn adjectives. Upon returning to class the students wrote down adjectives that they had thought of and then completed part of a worksheet from a ReadWriteThink lesson to plan their haiku poem. Finally, students presented their haiku poems in the center of a piece of autumn artwork, which they created from the leaves collected on their nature walk. The thing that I really love about Read Write Think is that you can find a wealth exemplary teaching ideas that you can than adapt and grow to suit your teaching needs. It is also really inspiring to see all of the amazing things happening in other classrooms.

Students learn components of think-alouds and type-of-text interactions through teacher modeling. In the process, students develop the ability to use think-alouds to aid in reading comprehension tasks.